On Wed, Jun 23, 2010 at 6:41 PM, Matt Zimmerman <mdz@ubuntu.com> wrote:
> Hello all,
>
> I'm not sure who's on this list, as it's just getting started, so maybe
> folks could introduce themselves?
Hi,
Thanks for starting this thread, Matt.
I'm a developer and the community leader of the Nexenta Project.
Nexenta is a Ubuntu derivative, porting the Ubuntu LTS userland
applications to the opensolaris kernel. It has a very active
community, and is widely deployed as a storage/SAN appliance due to
the underlying ZFS filesystem, and the ease of use of the apt/dpkg.
http://www.nexenta.org
I've been involved with NCP (Nexenta Core Platform) for the past two
years. I'm excited about the opportunities opened by the derivatives
front desk.
One of the biggest challenges we've faced, being a small community
porting thousands of packages, has been working with upstream to
include our patches (which are mostly solaris specific). It was upto
community developers/package porters to work with the upstream
maintainers to add the patch. I'm hoping to this front desk will
suggest, and lead to a more workable solution (for an active project
with small number of developers maintaining large number of packages).
Apart from this, Nexenta has continued independently as a viable
distribution. As a server, it is rock solid, and is the foundation of
a paid commercial storage appliance, NexentaStor, which is being used
in production by over 1000 paying customers. I'd like to work for
Nexenta to become more of an official offshoot of upstream
distributions. Previous discussions on this topic a few years ago have
had, for the lack of a better word, flamish tones, and a lack of
enthusiasm because of the fact that a small of OpenSolaris is released
as binaries (under a redistribution binary license). The FOSS license
used by OpenSolaris , CDDL, was then under unsure grounds with regards
to compatibility with existing Debian licenses.
We're tackling these issues, and I'll hopefully have more to share on
this front in my talk at debconf. In the meanwhile, I look forward to
discussions with you, over this list, and personally at DC, on what we
can do to add another kernel to the debian/debian-based ecosystem.
~Anil